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As I’m packing up to ride to Los Angeles as part of the AIDS/LifeCycle event which raises funds for AIDS research, I thought it would be a good time to provide an update on Mozilla Service Week. The AIDS/LifeCycle event (which is seven whopping days!) is made possible by hundreds of committed volunteers who support a moving village of bike riders each day and thousands of volunteer fundraisers. It’s exactly that type of spirit — people wanting to make a difference in their communities — that we’re looking to harness for Mozilla Service Week.

Since I initially posted about Mozilla Service Week, our effort to provide technology-based service to local communities and organizations, we’ve had great interest from our localization volunteers. Over 17 different locales have stepped forward to translate the site which magnifies our potential to do good around the world! We’ve also been working to complete the English version of the site which we’ll roll out shortly.

The actual week will take place in September. We’ll post more details soon on how you can get involved and make this an awesome week!

Hope you enjoyed our Social Media presentation a few weeks back. We’ve posted the video and slides for your viewing pleasure. As most of you know Social Media (Facebook, Reddit, Digg, Orkut, etc) played a huge role in helping us set a Guinness World Record last year — it took word of mouth to a whole new level for us! For Firefox 3.5, we’re hoping to leverage Social Media once again to gain incredible reach and create awareness in even more regions!

Here are just a few ways to help:

Help us identify the most popular social networks (Orkut, Hi5, Facebook, etc.) in your region, as well as any Mozilla or Firefox-related groups they might have. Post them here.

Thanks for joining William and me for the recent Firefox 3.5 events workshop! Events have always been important for us – helping to celebrate successes, such as a launch, garner awareness for Mozilla and Firefox, build community and draw in new members, and more! Unfortunately, we weren’t able to capture the Air Mozilla video for this session. Please comment below if you’d like us to host it again. In a meantime, here is a recap of the presentation below and slides can be found here.

As with each launch, we’re looking to have hundreds of Firefox launch parties around the world. Please stay tuned for details on how to plan them — we’re working on a new Spread Firefox page. Hope you’ll join in the fun!

If you have any questions or need some help please find us in #marketing on irc.mozilla.org!

We’ve been working this year to build our global marketing team around the Firefox 3.5 and increase our reach. We had over 130 people heed the call from countries such as Argentina, Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Macedonia and more! One of them was Vineel Reddy, a dedicated campus rep from India, who was recently featured as our community spotlight on Spread Firefox.

Vineel and his team decided to focus their efforts on creating an awesome video to demonstrate the increased speed of Firefox 3.5, add-ons and Personas. Check it out! They filmed the video entirely on their own. Here are some behind the scenes pictures to give you a sense of the effort that went into this video.

Awesome work, Vineel! Really looking forward to what the community marketing team has in store!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the workshops to-date — please feel free to share any feedback. We want to make sure that everyone is getting value out of these. We’ll post the Creative and Events workshop videos this week.

Here is this week’s lineup:

May 14th:

9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC – Social Media workshop: We’ll discuss the different ways we can put social networks, Twitter and other tools to work around the launch and it’s various campaigns.

10:00 a.m. PDT/17:00 UTC – Campus Reps: Jay Patel will show you the various ways you can participate in the launch as a Campus Rep.

May 15th:

9:00 a.m. PDT/16:00 UTC – PR online workshop: Melissa Shapiro, Nicole Loux and Barbara Hueppe will talk about how you can participate in PR which has always been a critical tool in growing Firefox awareness.

Quick note that Tara Shahian and Laura Mesa will be hosting tomorrow’s Creative Workshop for the Firefox 3.5 launch. If you want to get involved with the launch and have a creative bent or graphic skills, please tune in! The ladies will cover:

Why Creative / Visual Design is important

How to Contribute

Design Guidelines

Community Store / T-shirts

What are Affiliates

Why Affiliates are important

Existing Affiliate buttons / Creating new buttons

Here’s how to join:

Date: Thursday, May 7, 2009 9:00 am PDT/16:00 UTC

Dial-in Info: +1.650.903.0800, followed by 92# and then 7391#

Or you can use our toll-free number: +1.800.707.2533, followed by 369# and then 7391#. If you’re outside the US, use Skype to call in with our toll-free number.

If you can’t join the call — but want to ask questions — you can join us in #marketing on IRC (irc.mozilla.org).

While The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences named Absolut the category winner, I’m thrilled we snagged People’s Voice. Our campaign was entirely people-powered — 8 million of us taking the time to download Firefox and nab a Guinness World Record!

Thanks again to our wonderful designers Nobox and the whole community for making this happen!

Tonight we unveiled the new Spread Firefox design after a quarter of hard work! This was an enormous team effort and you’ll notice a lot of great changes. The original goals behind the redesign were to simplify the home page, make it more engaging and show some of the personality behind Firefox grassroots marketing. We are also trying to make it a lot clearer for users on what to do and where to go next. Here’s a recap of the major improvements.

In addition to the visual refresh and a whole slew of bug fixes, we rolled out new documentation — thanks to Lucy Connor — to help people get started and contribute to Spread Firefox. Documentation includes:

FAQ: A new and improved FAQ that covers everything from creating an account to the various resources on the site.

Some of the things I love about Mozilla (and there are a lot!) are our mission to make the Web a truly wonderful place for everyone, and our participatory process and culture. Not to mention the leeway and resources to try some pretty cool things. Rather than chasing world records this Spring (which is pretty fantastic!), we’re looking outward to see how we can harness the amazing energy and skills of the Mozilla community to help organizations and individuals in need. Enter: Mozilla Service Week.

Mozilla Service Week (June 22-29, 2009) invites you to use your skills to help people:

Use the Web

Have better access to the Web

and, have a better Web experience overall

This will include a whole host of activities, such as helping a school set up a wireless network, refurbishing and donating hardware to a community center, creating documentation and tutorials on how to get started on the Web, helping a non-profit refresh its website and more. The possibilities are endless for people of all skill levels to jump in and make a difference.

We’ll be posting more details on how the week will work and how you can all pitch in. In the near term we could use some help on localizing the program name. We’re looking to roll this out in as many languages as possible, including German, Japanese, French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Polish. “Service” can have very different connotations when translated directly and might not come close to meaning “volunteerism.” So here’s how you can pitch in:

Work with your fellow local community members to come to a consensus on an appropriate translation for “Mozilla Service Week” (i.e. discuss in your IRC channel or other forum)

Comment with a recommendation below

Provide a translation for our preliminary start page snippet if you’re on a roll: “Be the Difference! Better your community during Mozilla Service Week, June 22-29. Find out more.”

Let me know if you want to help translate or get the word out!

More details to come, but we’re all really excited to see what sort of impact we can make. As Margaret Mead said: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” This certainly rings true of the Mozilla community and we’re not so small anymore!